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G. Retscher, E. Mok:
"GPS Navigation and Guidance Systems for Construction Industry";
Talk: Conference on Advances in Building Technology ABT 2002, Hong Kong; 2002-12-04 - 2002-12-06; in: "Conference on Advances in Building Technology", Vol II (2002), 7 pages.

New applications for the use of GPS have emerged especially in construction industry in recent years. The applications are ranging from navigation of trucks in fleet management, the guidance of construction machines to precise surveying, setting out and monitoring of engineering structures. Thereby GPS can be employed in many different modes where the suitable method is selected depending on the accuracy requirements for position determination. Most of these applications require also the possibility for continuous position determination in real-time. If this is the case, nowadays modern real-time kinematic GPS (RTK-GPS) can be employed. The use of these modern surveying and positioning techniques facilitates also the development of new machinery and system processes in construction industry. Especially for the guidance of construction machines, systems have been developed to increase the productivity of construction works. Commercial systems are available nowadays from several companies, e.g. for the guidance of graders, dozers and caterpillars. In general, the systems use 3-D surveying systems for position determination mostly in combination with other sensors.

Following a brief description of satellite positioning modes, their major applications in construction industry will be highlighted and common features of modern 3-D machine guidance systems based on RTK-GPS will be outlined in this paper. Finally the 3-D machine guidance systems are compared with common conventional systems and their advantages summarized.